HEALTHCARE ON THE AIR
Randy Martin '65C-'69M dispenses good medicine on television
About a year ago, a farmer in Southwest Georgia began having chest pains and thought he was having a heart attack. He told his wife, but she assured him it was only a bad case of indigestion. The farmer had recently seen a television news report on early recognition of the signs of a heart attack, however, and he was certain of what was happening. The report explained that the proper thing to do was to take some aspirin and get to the hospital as quickly as possible.
"When he got to the hospital, he was actually having a big heart attack and getting there early and taking the aspirin basically saved him," says Emory cardiologist Randy Martin, who moonlights on WSB-TV as the Atlanta station's chief medical consultant. "The man's physician wrote me [and said the farmer had seen my story on television]. So that one guy has made three years of high stress worth it."
Since 1994, Martin has appeared on WSB more than six hundred times, reporting on everything from breaking health news to new treatments for common ailments.
"I didn't go into this to have people recognize me when I'm out on the street," he says. "I am truly fascinated, and I'm going to spend the remainder of my life figuring out how we can get good health information to people. I felt that organized medicine had failed to reach out to the public and that we in organized medicine needed to show the public that we are really their advocates, not their adversaries."
Melissa Wright, a special projects producer at WSB who works with Martin, says the station was attracted to him because of his sterling medical credentials and his natural talent as a communicator. "I think he really has a sincere desire to teach people about their health, whether it be treating a disease, preventing a disease, or just explaining exactly what happens inside the body," says Wright. "He's a very engaging personality, and he can bring home the message about health, using not only his medical expertise, but also a dash of humor at times and just some common sense advice."
Martin was Phi Beta Kappa and earned his undergraduate degree from Emory in psychology and biology in 1965. He then attended Emory Medical School and graduated summa cum laude in 1969. Martin pursued cardiology as a specialty, becoming a world-renowned expert in echocardiography, a non-invasive form of ultrasound used to detect heart problems. Because of his expertise, he was asked by Hewlett Packard, the maker of an ultrasound machine, to moderate a series of lectures on echocardiography and cardiology beamed live via satellite to physicians around the world. The lectures were successful, and the program grew into the world's largest professional medical teleconference.
"Out of that program, I started getting some feelers from the media," says Martin. "People were obviously seeing it, and they said, Gee, you have a good voice, and you project well on television; you ought to do some TV." In 1994, he accepted an offer from WSB to report on health issues.
"I think WSB had preconceived ideas about what they wanted me to do, and I had preconceived ideas of what I wanted to do, and it has taken a while to meld those together. Channel 2 has been very good and very easy to work with. They have been very receptive to my goals of trying to do very accurate, high-integrity reporting that's aimed at really trying to help people."
One of the main thrusts of Martin's reporting has been to educate the public about health care so that doctors and patients can work together. Martin explains that "having a patient who is well-informed is really critical to keeping them healthy and helping them to be a colleague in decision making."
As an example, Martin points to a special he did that focused on twenty-four hours in the operating room. "I thought it would be neat to take people into an operating room to see what all of the support staff do, what the anesthesiologist does, what the scrub nurse does, what the physician does," he says. "So we followed two patients, one through heart surgery and one through the new Parkinson's surgery that the colleagues at Emory are pioneering. And it was dynamite. The public didn't have any idea that the nurses have to count every hemostat and every suture and all that stuff, so that was fun."
But his reporting for WSB is not the only way Martin is disseminating health care information to the public. In 1994, he helped found and became the moderator for Emory's MiniMedical School. To date, some two thousand people have gone through the program, which is designed to show what's involved in a medical education.
"I wanted them to learn what I knew then and what I still know now, that the human body and health and disease processes are absolutely intriguing and fascinating," says Martin, who is also planning to explore the possibilities of providing health information via the Internet. "I wanted people to have some sense of that excitement."
Martin says that Michael M.E. Johns, Emory's executive vice president for health affairs, wants to help expand the MiniMedical School program. "Dr. Johns is very interested in expanding the concept of an organized approach to educating the lay person about the human body and disease processes.
He has said that we don't want to be the gatekeepers, we want to be the gateway through which people become informed, and I agree."--J.D.T.
Historic Quest
Cardiologist J. Willis Hurst, who served as chairman of the Department of Medicine at Emory from 1957 to 1986, recently published The Quest for Excellence: The History of the Department of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, 1834-1986. The book, which will be featured in the fall issue of Emory Magazine, examines the genesis of the University, the School of Medicine, associated hospitals, the Emory Clinic, and the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center. According to the author, the book's title refers to "the constant quest for excellence that creates the exciting environment necessary for meaningful progress" in the Department of Medicine.
LAYING HOLD OF THE TRUTH
Barbara Brown Taylor '73C is recognized as one of the world's best preachers
When word got out that Baylor University had included Barbara Brown Taylor '73C on its list of the twelve most effective preachers in the English-speaking world, unfamiliar faces started showing up in the Sunday morning services of her tiny mountain parish, Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, Georgia. The parish warmly welcomes visitors, but when tour buses began pulling up in front of the whitewashed clapboard antebellum church that seats only eighty-two, folks were a little overwhelmed.
Baylor's survey of fifteen hundred religious publications editors and teachers of preaching listed Taylor alongside more widely known figures such as evangelist Billy Graham; Lloyd Ogilvie, chaplain of the U.S. Senate; and Fred Craddock, professor emeritus in the Candler School of Theology. Publications including Newsweek, Glamour, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution frequently featured Taylor, the only woman on the list, in their coverage of the survey.
"For a while, there was hardly a Sunday when there wasn't a photographer on the porchor a group of tourists with books they wanted signed," says Taylor, who has had six collections of her sermons published. "I think we all enjoyed it for about a month, and then it got harder and harder for the church to be whatever normal is."
As Taylor, who earned her Emory degree in religion, began to contemplate the inevitable change the notoriety was bringing to her life as Grace-Calvary's rector, providence intervened. She was offered the Butman Chair in Religion and Philosophy at Piedmont College, a small liberal arts institution three miles down the road in Demorest. She resigned from Grace-Calvary last October after five years and began teaching two undergraduate religion courses per semester at Piedmont in January. The rest of her time is now given to teaching preaching at other institutions.
Fred Craddock, the other Georgian on the Baylor list with Taylor, has long served as one of her preaching models. She adopted Craddock, Candler's emeritus Bandy Professor of Preaching and New Testament, as her mentor not long after she earned her master of divinity degree from Yale University in 1976. She returned to Atlanta that year and worked in development at Candler until 1981. Never formally one of Craddock's students, Taylor says she learned by hearing him preach and reading his instructional texts.
"Listening to him was full of discovery," she says. "He's a little man with a kind of creaky voice. He doesn't have the standard equipment for a preacher. But seeing that and then hearing this powerful preaching come out of him made me realize that I could put material together like he did."
As Craddock does, Taylor preaches subtly and gently, using concrete images, humor, and stories. In her sermons, she speaks of the Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon Avenue, a long-time Emory haunt, as a place Jesus might frequent.
She describes the gospel as "not a flashlight but a fire. It can warm and it can burn." And she evokes the experience of first-time parents whose romantic notions of child-rearing have been dashed by long nights of colicky wails: "Staying up all night was not what they had in mind when they had a baby. They were thinking of Little League, ballet lessons, bedtime stories, Christmas. And yet for something so ephemeral, romance is an incredibly potent motivator. Without romance, we might never decide to bear children and discover what it means to give your life for the life of another. . . . We reach for our illusions; what we lay hold of is the truth."
For Taylor, who served as assistant and later associate rector of Atlanta's All Saints' Church for nine years before moving to Clarkesville, an effective sermon uses fresh language to render a timeless experience. "I can't stand up with my finger in the air and tell people what they ought to think and do and believe," she says. "Instead, I'm going to work more evocatively. I'm going to induce their own thinking and discovery."
The recent attention from the Baylor survey has heightened an already sizable demand for Taylor as a guest preacher and teacher of preaching at churches, conferences, and seminaries nationwide--work she enjoys but considers somewhat ironic since she has never taken a course in homiletics.
"A lot of preachers use code words, like salvation, sin, grace, redemption," she says. "And people don't know what those mean. I try to get them out of propositional preaching and into experiential preaching. I try to get them to use narrative."
But, Taylor acknowledges, there is something about effective preaching that cannot be taught. "When I preach, I want worship to happen. It's a kind of breathless reverence, a sense that something holy has just happened in our midst--God was there, and we all knew it."--A.O.A.
Lady Dine
Lorene Ray Haynie, who as director of food services at Emory for twenty-five years was known to thousands of students and faculty members, died January 16, 1998. She was ninety-six.
According to her daughter, Ann Haynie Jones, Haynie got the job as the University's chief cook in 1927 after several Emory administrators, impressed with her résumé but concerned the task was too much for a woman to handle, observed her at work at a downtown lunch counter.
"They went down and had lunch at the counter, and there was a customer who was complaining," Jones told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time of her mother's death. "They heard the way mother was handling him and hired her on the spot. She was polite and firm but didn't get snippy with him."
Haynie was known for running an economical kitchen without stinting on quality food. "Food service at Emory had always lost money," Jones said. "But the first year mother was hired they made a considerable profit." That tradition continued throughout her tenure, and when Haynie retired in 1952 the Emory Alumnus ran an article about her entitled "Twenty-five Years in the Black."
After she retired, Haynie and her husband founded the Hemlock Inn in Bryson City, North Carolina. Its country-style meals and mountain scenery were popular with vacationing Emory professors and physicians. The Haynies sold the inn in the 1970s and lived in a two-hundred-year-old log cabin they had restored near Cullowhee, North Carolina.--A.B.
OUR INNER OUTLAW
Law professor Martha Duncan examines the love-hate relationship between criminals and society
Convicted of breaking and entering, petit larceny, and burglary, James Blake spent more than thirteen years in a Florida state penitentiary. Soon after his release, he committed another crime and was sent back to prison. In a letter that appears in his 1971 memoir, The Joint, Blake wrote, "The basic misconception of most civilians about convicts is that they suffer, when actually they are comparatively blithe and carefree. Certainly they're not as harried as the gnomes I see on New York streets, scuttling and scurrying into subways like apprehensive White Rabbits."
According to Emory professor of law Martha G. Duncan, Blake's deliberate return to prison and his view of incarceration as relief from the frenetic pace of the outside world are not anomalies. In her recently published psychoanalytic study, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment, Duncan presents a surprising and ironic notion of criminality. For many, she suggests, prison is a refuge that also provides a strong surrogate familial bond. Meanwhile, on the other side of the prison walls, she argues, society is obsessed with criminals, often romanticizing outlaw figures like Billy the Kid, Robin Hood, and Long John Silver. Two primary points Duncan makes in her book concern the dynamic parent-child relationship--the love of imprisonment is rooted in an infant's love for its mother, and legendary outlaws represent a longed-for break from parental authority.
Duncan, who earned her Ph.D. degree in political science at Columbia University and a law degree at Yale University, also underwent training at the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute. In her book, she examines prison memoir, novels, case law, parliamentary debate records, and even opera as her principal sources. In this array of literature on criminality, she finds unifying themes of prison as a place of protection and rebirth and of the outlaw as an object of both love and loathing.
"This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns--about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds . . . ," Duncan writes. She adds that criminals and noncriminals "live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, living for as well as off each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising ways."
Duncan, who teaches courses in criminal law, law and literature, juvenile law, and law and psychoanalysis, also explores what she describes as the widespread use of a "metaphor of filth" within the criminal justice system. "References to criminals as 'dirt,' 'slime,' and 'scum' pervade the media and everyday conversation . . . ," she writes. "Strongly repelling and strongly attracting, filth serves as an apt metaphor for criminals, who likewise evoke our simultaneous hate and love, repudiation and admiration."
Although Duncan originally intended her book for an audience of legal scholars and mental health professionals, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons has engaged a much broader readership. "I've gotten letters from prison wardens who wrote me that guards and inmates were discussing my ideas," she says.
The Arizona Daily Sun praised Duncan's style as "accessible to the motivated general reader as well as a more academic audience." The New York Times Book Review also found her "fresh way of organizing and addressing" crime and punishment provocative. And the Legal Studies Forum calls the book "an important, creative work" that is "elegant throughout and intelligently reasoned."
In the end, Duncan's complex view of the relationship between criminals and noncriminals questions the nature of contemporary criminal justice. "It isn't simply them against us," she says. "I think noncriminals need to be aware of the criminality in themselves. It's clear that there is some percentage of criminals who are committing crimes to get into prison. Life is pretty bad in freedom for a lot of people if they have to go to prison to get 'three hots and a cot' or a sense of family and community."--A.O.A.
A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND MILES
Videoconferencing technology expands Emory and Oxford classrooms
Last fall, Oxford College students began taking Emory College courses without having to traverse Interstate 20. New videoconferencing centers installed in the Oxford library and in a Candler Library classroom on the Emory campus have enabled Juliette Apkarian, associate professor and chair of the Department of Russian, Eurasian, and East Asian Languages, to teach an introductory Russian language course to Emory and Oxford students simultaneously.
This new technology will help both Oxford and Emory students prepare for the increasing number of career possibilities in countries outside the West. "I was struck by the fact that over the years I've been at Emory, very few Oxford students have taken the languages I have taught in the department," says Apkarian, who alternated teaching the Russian class at 8:30 a.m. four times a week from Emory and once a week from Oxford. Apkarian's department also teaches Chinese, Japanese, Georgian, Hungarian, Polish, and Czech.
Emory and Oxford's videoconference classrooms integrate video, audio, computers, VCRs, laser disc, and slide-to-video capacity over a high-speed telephone line. Apkarian deliberately chose a Russian language course for the pilot project because, she says, "with language, especially non-Western language that does not use the Latin alphabet, the audio and visual elements have to be superb. This beginning class posed uncompromising standards for the technology."
The custom-designed classroom in the Oxford library has been so successful that it is being used as a model for other institutions. In both locations, one monitor gives students a view of their own class and another monitor displays a view of the other class. The students on each campus speak to one another as though they were in the same room.
Occasionally, teacher and students alike have forgotten the technology is there. "There have been times when someone will attempt to pass a piece of paper to the other side," Apkarian says. "And there's actually more eye contact among students than in a traditional classroom. It's a very human and humane teaching technology because it brings people together who normally couldn't come together."
Emory College sophomore Alexander Ginzburg, a student in the Russian 101 course, is droll about the experience. "It's not so strange, really," he says. "You could have a class on a spaceship at 8:30 in the morning and it wouldn't matter."
Faculty on both campuses will undergo training in the spring to use the technology in other fields of study, including mathematics and English. Apkarian hopes to see similiar links established between Emory and other institutions, as well. Her Russian 101 students already have had conversations with students at a university in Moscow using this new technology. "If we can link within our own house," she says, "we're ready to link with the rest of the world."
Oxford Dean William H. Murdy echoes Apkarian's belief that this technology will be increasingly central to necessary growth in curricula on both campuses. "Technology is a tool to enhance the faculty's effectiveness to teach and the students' ability to learn," he says. "But it should never be allowed to diminish the human dimension of education--the teacher-student relationship--at the heart of the educational process."--A.O.A.
THE LAW IN GEORGIA
Thurbert Baker '79L is the state's new attorney general
When Governor Zell Miller appointed Emory School of Law alumnus Thurbert Baker as Georgia's new attorney general last year, Baker stressed that one of his top priorities would be targeting domestic violence. It was an issue that had troubled him since his childhood in rural North Carolina.
"I grew up in a small Southern town, and I remember a couple who lived not very far from where we did," Baker said recently from his office across the street from the State Capitol. A photograph of him and his wife, Catherine, with Bill and Hillary Clinton at a White House Christmas party rests on a book shelf behind his desk. "The husband was probably the neighborhood troublemaker, but his wife was one of the nicest people you'd ever meet. I don't remember a single time when she didn't have a smile on her face or a kind word to say, but I also don't remember a single time when her face wasn't badly bruised and swollen. That left a very definite impression on me, and I always wondered why grownups would let something like that happen. In the back of my mind I always said that if I ever got big enough, I'd like to do something about that. Now I have a chance."
Baker earned his bachelor's degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill prior to receiving his law degree from Emory in 1979. Before becoming attorney general, he served for nine years in the Georgia House of Representatives as a Democrat from DeKalb County. For seven of those years, he worked as Governor Miller's floor leader, introducing legislation on the governor's agenda and helping to get it passed, including welfare reform, tougher DUI laws, and the state lottery. During his time as a state representative, Baker earned "a reputation for hard work and bridge-building," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and when Michael Bowers resigned as attorney general to run for governor, Miller said Baker was his first and only choice for the post.
"The smartest thing I've ever done as governor was to get Thurbert Baker to be my floor leader in the House of Representatives," Miller said in an address announcing Baker's appointment. "In that rough, tough, combat zone, he performed magnificently. He, more than any other single individual, is responsible for the notable success this administration has had with our legislative agenda. . . . Not for one moment did I consider anyone else for this powerful and sensitive position."
Howard O. Hunter, dean of the Emory School of Law, also has confidence in the new attorney general. "Thurbert Baker was an active, energetic member of the law school community when he was a student at Emory and was well liked by his student colleagues and by the members of the faculty," Hunter told Emory Magazine. "Since graduation, he has been a successful and respected lawyer, an effective state legislator, and an active member of the Emory alumni community. He is straightforward, approachable, and hard-working. I expect that he will be an excellent attorney general for the State of Georgia."
In his new job, Baker serves as the state's chief lawyer and top law enforcement officer. His office has a staff of about 175, of whom 100 are lawyers. One of his office's primary responsibilities is defending the state whenever it gets sued. For example, says Baker, "every time the General Assembly passes a piece of legislation, the law gets challenged in the court system on whether or not it's constitutional. We end up having to defend the state on those matters." To give an idea of the volume of work his office handles, at one point last fall he and his staff were handling more than sixteen thousand matters.
In addition to domestic violence, another of Baker's priorities will be consumer fraud. "The attorney general's office ought to be very aggressive in that area," he says. "More times than not the victims are the elderly who worked all their lives and have their life's savings in a bank somewhere. One day they get a call from a telemarketing fraud, and their money is gone. And I think that's just despicable."
A considerable amount of attention has been focused on the fact that Baker is the only African-American state attorney general in the country and the first ever in this state. But to Baker, his race is a non-issue.
"I think it's misplaced attention. I don't focus on that," says Baker, who must win a statewide election in November to earn a full, four-year term in office. "I think people want to know what I'm going to do as attorney general to make a difference in their lives. That's what they want to know about. And if you do a good job at that, everything works out. If you don't do a good job, it won't work out."--J.D.T.
Photo by Ann Borden
A FORCE FOR RECONCILIATION
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew receives the Emory President's Medal
In a recent luncheon ceremony in the plaza of the Woodruff Health Sciences building, University President William M. Chace presented His All Holiness Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople and New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, with the Emory President's Medal. One of the highest honors granted by the University, the President's Medal recognizes individuals whose impact on the world has enhanced the dominion of peace or has enlarged the range of cultural achievement. It was first awarded in September 1995 to His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, and was again presented in July 1996 to Carlos Menem, president of Argentina.
Primary patriarch of the Orthodox Churches in Russia, Eastern and Southern Europe, and the Middle and Far East, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew ascended to the Ecumenical Throne in 1991. He has presided over the restoration and reestablishment of autonomous orthodox churches in the newly freed countries of Georgia, Estonia, and Albania. He also serves as a mediating and reconciling force between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
"You nobly represent a tradition that stretches back two thousand years in unbroken succession, a tradition that continues to nourish the tree of faith in our day and on our campus," President Chace told the Ecumenical Patriarch before a gathering of more than one hundred members of the Emory community. "That tradition is alive throughout the world, and as you have seen in your recent travels in this country, it is very much alive in the United States. I want you to know that it is also alive here, through our many Religious Life programs and through Emory's rich relationship with ecumenical and interfaith conversation."
President Chace continued, reading from the medal citation: "Your message of reconciliation among nations and of stewardship for creation challenges us to lives of work and prayer."
Thanking the University, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said, "We are proud of the faithful and receive this recognition from your esteemed university on their behalf. This institution is a shining example of furthering the progress of our culture, its science and technology, through the moral and ethical commitment to values in the rich, complex diversity of what is best in American culture."--A.O.A.
A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Thomas S. Robertson is appointed dean of the Goizueta Business School
Thomas S. Robertson, deputy principal of the London Business School, will assume the deanship of the Goizueta Business School on July 1, 1998. He succeeds retiring Dean Ronald E. Frank, who has presided over the school since 1989.
A native of Scotland whose family immigrated to Detroit in 1955, Robertson holds dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in business from the Graduate School of Northwestern University.
Robertson was an assistant professor at both Harvard Business School and the University of California at Los Angeles before joining the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. During his twenty-three-year tenure there, he held the Pomerantz Chair of Marketing, chaired the marketing department, and served as associate dean for executive education.
Robertson joined the London Business School as Sainsbury Professor of Marketing and chair of the marketing faculty in 1994. At both Wharton and the London Business School, he played key roles in successful fund-raising efforts for new buildings, endowed chairs, and research.
He also holds ties to the corporate world as a consultant and board member. His clients in marketing strategy have included AT&T, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Roche Laboratories, T. Rowe Price, and Rolls-Royce.
Robertson said he was drawn to the Goizueta Business School by what he perceives as its realistic opportunity to move into the top ranks of business education.
"It's part of an outstanding university, is located in a global university, and is well positioned to make its move. I believe that taking the helm at Goizueta will be a wonderful and exciting opportunity."
University president William M. Chace said of Robertson, "[His] accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, and academic administrator, his proven fund-raising abilities, and his involvement in the international business community make him the global citizen we have been seeking for this appointment. We are fortunate to have recruited a dean with his superb talents and experience to succeed Ron Frank."
During Frank's tenure, the number and quality of students and faculty grew, the school's recognition in national rankings of leading business schools increased, and a new, $26.5-million, 120,000-square-foot facility was dedicated.
"Ron Frank's leadership of the business school will stand in the history of this university as a period of remarkable achievement," President Chace said. "He has nurtured his vision of preeminence for the school, and under his leadership we have made great strides toward realizing that vision."--A.O.A.
$40 million in gifts
Within days of the announcement of Thomas S. Robertson's appointment as the new dean of the Goizueta Business School, Emory President William M. Chace reported that the University had received a $20-million gift from the estate of the business school's namesake, the late Roberto C. Goizueta, former chairman and chief executive officer of The Coca-Cola Company. Goizueta died of lung cancer on October 18, 1997.
A second, unrelated $20-million gift from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation honoring Goizueta was announced within ten days of the Goizueta bequest.
President Chace said the Goizueta gift represented "a wonderful and visionary challenge to the new dean and his academic colleagues."
Bradley Currey Jr., chairman of Emory's Board of Trustees, speculated that Goizueta would have been pleased with the new dean.
"Tom Robertson is an internationally recognized expert in marketing strategy and consumer behavior," Currey said. "He's a citizen of both the U.S. and the U.K. That would have delighted Roberto."
Together the gifts nearly triple the Goizueta Business School's current $25-million endowment and will enable the school to continue to improve its academic quality by increasing the size and stature of its faculty and student body.
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